A catastrophic event on solaris-3 referred to as “the lament” has unleashed a cycle of destruction that is continuing with no signs of stopping causing monsters to run rampant and some individuals to awaken special abilities, leading to a desperate struggle for survival in the post-apocalyptic world of Wuthering Waves an action rpg game. the lament's power came in the form of destructive waves, bringing forth to the lands of solaris things called tacets fields which allow for monsters called tacet discords to have an outbreak and increase rapidly in number across most of the regions of solaris. The destructive waves that manifest tacet fields and tacet discord outbreaks are referred to as the "Waveworn phenomenon", as a result of the phenomena the game depicts a world ravaged by chaos as former human settlements and places of work now lie in ruin with extremely damaged infrastructure and no signs of human life, one such a place is the Port City of Guixu as the area is filled with countless ruins like floating bottomless skyscrapers, free way roads with massive holes that cut off the path, broken down cars with missing parts and rusty metal etc, and all of these things having grass and bushes growing like they are part of the infrastructure to showcase the long duration that the cycle of the lament has been ongoing. To ensure the survival of the few left in the face of danger the humans have been forced to develop technology that would help them stay safe and take on jobs that are a response to then ongoing lament, with cities like Jinzhou becoming fortified and being built over a large body of water and at a high altitude, with organisations of scientists seen throughout the city researching the waveworn and other places dedicated to the Midnight rangers that act as the military wing tasked with fighting the tacet discords. Throughout the uninhabited places within the region, the Midnight rangers frequently patrol the routes that would ultimately lead to human settlements and have set up bases outside Jinzhou to actively prevent the discords from going to human settlements that are left and scientists are found at ruins collecting data to further understand the waveworn. Among the remaining humans some became Resonators which are are people capable of manipulating their own frequencies to exhibit resonance abilities know as fortes and acquiring a physical tacet mark on their bodies. These resonators are what players use to engage in the world of Wuthering waves in a team of no more than three to fight the tacet discords having one character on-field. To showcase the resonators ability to work with the waves, the combat system in the game allows players to use each character’s unique fortes to create their own combos using the three resonators in the team through animation cancels by using a combat mechanic of quick swaps to utilize input buffering/input overloading, where a player can hold an input and swap to another character to perform some action and allowing the first character to remain on-field until their animation is completed before disappearing, this allows players to use their own creativity and actively think about the best rotations between the characters to optimize forte damage by using more than one character on-field at almost the same time which highly promotes the player’s engagement while in combat rather than just smashing inputs. The player is required to increase their world level through exploration and quests to be able to upgrade weapons and resonators. To help fight the tacet discords, scientists developed a gadget called the Pangu terminal that collects the reverberations of defeated monsters by transforming them to echoes to be used by resonators in battle by using their abilities to fight other discords, these echoes are what players must collect to increase their resonators damage stats like attack,health and more, it is this echo building that players may feel overwhelmed as they do not always get the stats they want leading to a player having to go around the game regions defeating the discords and not receiving the intended attribute. To level up the echoes, weapons and the resonators’ forte abilities like the resonance skill and resonance liberation as well as the forte burst, players need to collect material from certain places within the game that use waveplates to exhange for the material, these waveplates are limited and reset per day meaning to fully level up everything you need to get stronger a player would need to login into game on mutliple days as the materials exchanged are not a enough and consume 60 or 40 waveplates out of a total of 240, compared to other games like Genshin Impact which is also an action rpg, the materials in wuthering waves are significantly lower leading to players having to login many days to make sure the resonators on the team are all built to be able to defeat the tacet discords as their levels also increase with the world level, this system leads players to plan how they going to use their resources more effectively and get in the habit of figuring out which is important to level up first to be able to at least defeat a stronger a opponent even if it would take a considerable longer amount of time which can be a skill that is used in everyday life to use their time resourcefully and weigh out if some things are doable without spending important resources and develop a habit of doing things even if they are not in circumstances they would like but can tough it out and treat them like any stronger opponent or the low number of materials can be interpreted as a reflection of Solaris’s struggle against the lament, in which humanity trying desperately to survive that resources to make resonators stronger are not in abundance but that are very rare because of the destruction of the waveworn across the lands. The most effective aspect of the game is the domains, these are places where players go to collect materials in exchange for waveplates to upgrade their gear, in Genshin Impact the domains do not open everyday but on certain days of the week, but with wuthering waves a player is not forced to login on specific days to level up their equipment and this avoids a situation where they would have enough resources to collect materials to upgrade both character abilities and weapons but only having upgraded the weapon because the domain to get materials for the abilities would not be open, this gives players easy planning to do and do not feel as if you are forced to incorporate a game into your schedule but rather login when you have time. The least effective aspect of wuthering waves is the english voice acting as the audio and overall tone of the actors seem to be unpolished at best and in most cases consisting of monotonous tone which often makes the story seem dull as the voice acting is what often helps the story to come to life an example being the genshin voice actors carry the emotion of the characters highlighting the theme of the quests where players can just tell from the characters the mood of the situation having the quests leave more of an impression on the view even if the quest was not part of the main story line.